It's a small world

A few weekends ago I wet home to DC to do some dancing. I had a flight out on a Friday afternoon, and when I got to the airport I found that it had been delayed. Apparently our plane had some mechanical problems, so they were fixing it in another city. Anyway, I was sitting around making small talk with the people around me. I ended up talking with a soon-to-be doctor and this girl who had a pretty pessimistic outlook on life. We passed the time swapping stories and telling about ourselves. It turns out that the Doctor actually volunteers for the RIT ambulance sometimes, and the pessimist went to the same college as the Doctor. It was just interesting that we were all sort of interrelated. So we finally get on the other plane that the airline sent up and we all got to DC where we parted ways.

I danced all weekend and completed my photoshoot. Everything was so much fun; Orion and I placed first in our strictly, and then I placed second in my Jack and Jill! And then there were the tee-shirts...I'm not even going to go into that here.

But alas, a great weekend must always come to an end, and all too soon, I found myself back at the airport again. So I was going through security and in the middle of lifting that rediculously heavy camera when I heard this voice behind me exclaim, "Hey, it's the photographer!" I turned around thinking it would be one of my dance friends heading home from the weekend, but I was pleasantly suprised to see the Doctor from the Rochester Airport standing behind me. "No way, what are you doing here?!" (Dumb question...what's he going to say, oh I thought I would go skydiving? Obviously, he was flying home as well.) So we walked over to the gate and sat together and talked about our weekends. It was just so weird to be waiting there again with the same person. Normally I don't ever see the person I've talked to again...so this was really out of the ordinary. Eventually, they called our flight for boarding, and as we were waiting in line, I looked ahead, and there in front of us boarding was the Pessimist. I had to do a double take...was that really her? Seriously, it was. So we all got on the plane and when we finally landed I told them both that I wanted to take a portrait of all three of us. I thought the image would work well for my surreal portrait assignment. So when we landed I broke out the 4x5 camera (both of them were completely shocked that I had to shoot with this huge camera), focused and got a security guard to actually take the picture. He asked why, and we told him how we met, so he proceeded to ask each of us to a lottery number (8, 7, and 3). I wonder if he won...

The image itself is really crappy, but the idea that it holds is quite possibly the most surreal of all the portraits. I'm still going to turn it in, although I think there will have to be some writing that goes along with it. I meet all sorts of interesting people in my travels, but rarely to I have the oppertunity to see them again. I'm so glad that I actually have that image. It's not everyday that I get to take pictures of someone who I've just met, let alone feel like I may have gotten to know a stranger a little better. It was one of my better life experiences, I have to admit.